Obamanations

The pseudonymous Spengler has written a highly speculative column on Barack Obama’s secret that is must reading. Spengler draws powerful inferences based on scanty evidence derived from “Obama’s women” (his wife and mother). His conclusion is that Obama hates America.
I have doubts about each of Spengler’s inferences, and his conclusion seems to me in any event to overstate the case. In what sense does Spengler mean that Obama hates America? In the sense that George McGovern and Jimmy Carter do? In the sense that the McGovernized, progressive Democratic Party does? If so, the hatred is something with which we are far more familiar than Spengler’s column implies, however wrong and destructive the hatred is.
Spengler’s analysis of Mrs. Obama’s Princeton thesis also seems to me somewhat overdrawn. I’m not sure that her thesis reveals her to have anything more than the kind of doubts and resentments to which the potential beneficiaries of affirmative action at elite educational instiitutions are prone as a result of the Faustian bargain that Shelby Steele has described. Mrs. Obama’s notorious statements about her lack of pride in America until recently show that the resentments extend beyond Princeton to the United States, but her sentiment is also one that is common to a lot of liberals.
Nevertheless, given Obama’s thin public record, Spengler’s speculations are useful and provocative. I’m just not sure they make him out to be anything other than a McGovernite liberal.
PAUL agrees: It doesn’t seem wise to infer the essence of someone as intelligent and accomplished as Obama based on an analysis of his mother and his wife. For better or for worse, Obama pretty clearly is his own man.
I take Obama to be a careful and independent observer of America, and assume that his conclusions about it to are more nuanced than can accurately be captured by the word “hatred.”
JOHN agrees: I’m pretty sure Obama is fond of those aspects of American life that made him the President of the Harvard Law Review, a United States Senator, and a leading candidate for President of the United States. How that relates to the perspective of the majority of American voters remains to be seen.
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